I bet if they'd only used AI assisted coding would be a complete non-event, but oh no, some inconsequential assets were generated, grab the pitchforks!
As always the market decides.
The use of generative AI for art is being rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.
The quality suffers in both cases and I would personally criticise generative AI in source code as well, but the ethical argument is only against profiting from artists' work eithout their consent.
The double standard here is too much. Notice how one is stealing while the other is learning from? How are diffusion models not "learning from all the previous art"? It's literally the same concept. The art generated is not a 1-1 copy in any way.
Ok but that's just a training issue then. Have model A be trained on human input. Have model A generate synthetic training data for model B. Ensure the prompts used to train B are not part of A's training data. Voila, model B has learned to produce rather than copy.
Many state of the art LLMs are trained in such a two-step way since they are very sensitive to low-quality training data.
Yeah right. AI art models can and have been used to basically copy any artist’s style many ways that make the original actual artist’s hard work and effort in honing their craft irrelevant.
Who profits? Some tech company.
Who loses? The artists who now have to compete with an impossibly cheap copy of their own work.
This is theft at a massive scale. We are forcing countless artists whose work was stolen from them to compete with a model trained on their art without their consent and are paying them NOTHING for it. Just because it is impressive doesn’t make it ok.
Shame on any tech person who is okay with this.
Concerns about the livelihood of artists or the accumulation of wealth by large tech megacorporations are valid but aren’t rooted in AI. They are rooted in capitalism. Fighting against AI as a technology is foolish. It won’t work, and even if you had a magic wand to make it disappear, the underlying problem remains.
Code is an abstract way of soldering cables in the correct way so the machine does a thing.
Art eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human.
Code can be artisanal and beautiful, or it can be plumbing. The same is true for art assets.
Art is an abstract way of manipulating aesthetics so that the person feels or thinks a thing.
Doesn't sound very elusive nor wrong to me, while remaining remarkably similar to your coding definition.
> while asking questions about what it means to be human
I'd argue that's more Philosophy's territory. Art only really goes there to the extent coding does with creativity, which is to say
> the machine does a thing
to the extent a programmer has to first invent this thing. It's a bit like saying my body is a machine that exists to consume water and expel piss. It's not wrong, just you know, proportions and timing.
This isn't to say I classify coding and art as the same thing either. I think one can even say that it is because art speaks to the person while code speaks to the machine, that people are so much more uppity about it. Doesn't really hit the same as the way you framed this though, does it?
If some creator with intentionality uses an AI generated rock texture in a scene where dialogue, events, characters and angles interact to tell a story, the work does not ask questions about what it means to be human anymore because the rock texture was not made by him?
And in the same vein, all code is soldering cables so the machine does a thing? Intentionality of game mechanics represented in code, the technical bits to adhere or work around technical constraints, none of it matters?
Your argument was so bad that it made me reflexively defend Gen AI, a technology that for multiple reasons I think is extremely damaging. Bad rationale is still bad rationale though.
The game is art according to that definition while the individual assets in it are not.
All art? Those CDs full of clip art from the 90's? The stock assets in Unity? The icons on your computer screen? The designs on your wrapping paper? Some art surely does "[elude] definition while asking questions about what it means to be human", and some is the same uninspired filler that humans have been producing ever since the first the first teenagers realized they could draw penis graffiti. And everything else is somewhere in between.
I consider some code I write art.
The argument seems to be that it's different when the learner is a machine rather than a human, and I can sort of see the 'if everyone did it' argument for making that distinction. But even if we take for granted that a human should be allowed to learn from prior art and a machine shouldn't, this just guarantees an arms race for machines better impersonating humans, and that also ends in a terrible place if everyone does it.
If there's an aspect I haven't considered here I'd certainly welcome some food for thought. I am getting seriously exasperated at the ratio of pathos to logos and ethos on this subject and would really welcome seeing some appeals to logic or ethics, even if they disagree with my position.
I always believed GPL allowed LLM training, but only if the counterparty fulfills its conditions: attribution (even if not for every output, at least as part of the training set) and virality (the resulting weights and inference/training code should be released freely under GPL, or maybe even the outputs). I have not seen any AI company take any steps to fulfill these conditions to legally use my work.
The profiteering alone would be a sufficient harm, but it's the replacement rhetoric that adds insult to injury.
There are artists who would (and have) happily consented, licensed, and been compensated and credited for training. If that's what LLM trainers had led with when they went commercial, if anything a sector of the creative industry would've at least considered it. But companies led with mass training for profit without giving back until they were caught being sloppy (in the previous usage of "slop").
But code is complicated, and hallucinations lead to bugs and security vulnerabilities so it's prudent to have programmers check it before submitting to production. An image is an image. It may not be as nice as a human drawn one, but for most cases it doesn't matter anyway.
The AI "stole" or "learned" in both cases. It's just that one side is feeling a lot more financial hardship as the result.
There is a problem with negative incentives, I think. The more generative AI is used and relied upon to create images (to limit the argument to inage generation), the less incentive there is for humans go put in the effort to learn how to create images themselves.
But generative AI is a deadend. It can only generate things based on what already exists, remixing its training data. It cannot come up with anything truly new.
I think this may be the only piece of technology humans created that halts human progress instead of being something that facilitates further progress. A dead end.
As far as I'm concerned, not at all. FOSS code that I have written is not intended to enrich LLM companies and make developers of closed source competition more effective. The legal situation is not clear yet.
1. There is tons of public domain or similarly licensed artwork to learn from, so there's no reason a generative AI for art needs to have been trained on disallowed content anymore than a code generating one.
2. I have no doubt that there exist both source code AIs that have been trained on code that had licenses disallowing such use and art AIs have that been trained only on art that allows such use. So, it feels flawed to just assume that AI code generation is in the clear and AI art is in the wrong.
This reasoning is invalid. If AI is doing nothing but simply "learning from" like a human, then there is no "stealing from artists" either. A person is allowed to learn from copyright content and create works that draw from that learning. So if the AI is also just learning from things, then it is not stealing from artists.
On the other hand if you claim that it is not just learning but creating derivative works based on the art (thereby "stealing" from them), then you can't say that it is not creating derivative works of the code it ingests either. And many open source licenses do not allow distribution of derivative works without condition.
Analogy: the common area had grass for grazing which local animals could freely use. Therefore, it's no problem that megacorp has come along and created a massive machine which cuts down all the trees and grass which they then sell to local farmers. After all, those resources were free, the end product is the same, and their machine is "grazing" just like the animals. Clearly animals graze, and their new "gazelle 3000" should have the same rights to the common grazing area -- regardless of what happens to the other animals.
The analogy isn't really helpful either. It's trivially obvious that they are different things without the analogy, and the details of how they are different are far too complex for it to help with.
I'm not sure that LLMs respect that restriction (since they generally don't attibute their code).
I'm not even really sure if that clause would apply to LLM generated code, though I'd imagine that it should.
In the end it doesn’t matter. Here “learning” means observing an existing work and using it to produce something that is not a copy.
Note that this tends to require specific license exemptions. In particular, GCC links various pieces of functionality into your program that would normally trigger the GPL to apply to the whole program, and for this reason, those components had to be placed under the "GCC Runtime Library Exception"[1]
so... all of them
According to your omnivision?